


Under (Re)construction

by orphan_account



Category: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Genre: Drabble Collection, Established Relationship, Multi, Set between end of og and like a year after doc, Some fluff some angst some not-really-smut, because it makes me happy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-27
Updated: 2017-02-27
Packaged: 2018-09-27 08:19:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9984932
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: They are parts from different machines, the three of them, but they fit together. When the parts come pulled barehanded from the rubble, it's the fitting they chose to count on.





	

**Author's Note:**

> So back in 2014 I attempted a '30 day drabble challenge'. It was fun to sort back through those, and pick out the ones I still kind of liked. Much nostalgia. Not really edited so my apologies for that. Probably now in direct contradiction to other things I've written and probably not even consistent internally within this collection but. Hey. 2014. 
> 
> Content Warnings: Discussion of past tragedy. Mention of dubious consent outside of the tagged ship.

**Beggining**  
Her sheets smell like her. And like them. Surprising, how familiar it is. It’s several long breaths before she actually open her eyes. If she is expecting the light to look different, it doesn’t. If she’s expecting the morning noises of Edge to have changed, they haven’t. Still, there’s a rush of almost adolescent glee when the arm thrown over her tightens, and a bristly cheek rubs against hers.

“Morning.” It’s ridiculously comfortable, but the day calls.

She swings herself off of the bed, and onto a warm, flailing, yelping body where the floor should be.

Ah, there’s the other one.

 **Restless**  
Tifa slices fruit. Orange slices, lime slices, lemon slices. Then slices the same in twirls. She comes down and realigns glasses, in the small morning hours. She trains, but it doesn’t satisfy. She thinks maybe this is why Rude drags Reno into the desert sometimes, with a couple of half made bombs. They leave bound up like clenched teeth, and come back loose and wild, and feeling like things that don’t belong to her.

Reno takes one look at her grip on the rag, and takes it out of her hand as they head for the door.

“You coming, or?”

 **Snowflake**  
First snow of the season. It had rolled in overnight, and was still coming down, in big fat flakes that clung, and melted slowly. Rude isn’t fond of snow. But his companions are. He stands up straight against the cold, because he doesn’t lean into walls, and that would only be colder. Listens to Tifa and Reno shrieking and laughing as they chase each other around with snowballs, and he smiles as Tifa gets Reno to the ground, shoving snow in his clothes, and is pulled down too.

They forget that really, they’re both quite young still, but Rude doesn’t.

 **Haze**  
Reno likes kissing. Like, really likes kissing. Like, probably at least as much as sex, and more than alcohol and nicotine and maybe even more than explosions, likes kissing. And it still kind of takes him by surprise whenever Rude or Tifa do it. That it’s an actual option. That it’s a thing they want to do.

And he’s not sure why he’s thinking about this now, through the stinging smoke and the electrical sparks and the maybe-becoming-problematic-blood-loss because he really needs his whole brain focused on the task of not biting it. Needs to stay conscious. Needs to get home.

 **Flame**  
Fire doesn’t scare her. It draws her. At least when she’s awake. It does something different in her sleep; licking and tearing over walls and into corners until there are no spaces left that aren’t flickering bright, and blue edged, and blistering.

She doesn’t wake up in the middle of the night quaking with fear. She does wake up tight with rage, and helplessness. Fingers twisted silently in fabric, teeth grinding. She doesn’t wake up alone very often anymore, and there are hands that try to un-knit hers, and part of her resents them. Should resent them. Has not yet given up the wanting to. 

They work, though.

 **Formal**  
Tie. Corsage. Jacket. Vest. Shoe. Other shoe. Belt. They find them in a haphazard trail over the course of the evening. Sort of hidden. Sort of stuck into nooks and crannies and behind things and under things and in corners. Rude just gathers them up without a word, folding neatly where he can.

It’s only a little bit of a surprise.

“What the fuck. Do you know how easy it is to strangle someone with their own tie, yo? Look at these pants. You can’t hardly run in these.” Unease.

Mostly though, she’s surprised how far apart the shoes are.

 **Companion**  
Rude does not do ‘alone’ as well as he thinks he does. Doesn’t do lonely either. Not as well as he thinks he does.

So it always comes as a surprise to him; the volume of the clock in a quiet office or bedroom, the creeping time distortion, the crackling emptiness that reminds him of long rides with strangers over dusty roads while home gets further and further away.

Much as he’d like to, Reno can’t always be there.

But he can sit on desks. He can mention, in an offhand, smoke exhaling way, that Tifa’s bar is open tomorrow.

 **Move**  
Inhale. Exhale.

The instant before movement, both shorter and longer than thought. Her heartbeat slow, steady, resting rhythm.

Movement. Out of the corner of her eye. Fast and unpredictable.

Inhale. Exhale.

Movement. Right in front of her. Tight and powerful.

They crash in turns. Against her. Against each other. Pulses accelerate. Lungs pull at oxygen. Chemicals flooding through arteries and veins.

Inhale. Exhale.

Every time she gets to use her fists she realizes it’s been too long.

They all leave each other marked. Breathless. And they pull each other up from training mats with bruised hands and relief.

Inhale. Exhale.

 **Knowledge**  
There are scars beneath the tattoos on Reno’s face; raised and smooth and jaggedly uneven. Rude knows how they got there, and Tifa doesn’t. She will, when she learns how to ask the right questions. Rude knows everything there is to know about his partner. Has felt him like another limb for years.

But he doesn’t know Tifa. There is still so much getting to know. Like how she likes her eggs, and the name of the song she hums when closing up, and if the curl of her hair around her finger is thoughtful, or playful.

He wants to learn.

 **Wind**  
Love; the word and thought. Of the three of them, Reno questions it least.

He’s gone ahead again, like always. Just a few yards, like always. Chasing windswept leaves that skitter and glow.

He turns, reaches out, because he wants them to see too. Then he stops. Because them. Caught in the wind. Both of them, with goosebumps on their skin, and her hair flying, and his mouth at her ear and her hand in his.

He always loves them. But just then, all at once, it’s like staring at the sun.

His fingers crave hair, crave skin, warmth. He buries them in his pockets.

 **Thanks**  
She hadn’t known who else to call. Barrett was at work, way out of cell reception. Cloud had a delivery to the Chocobo farm, and would still be out past Kalm. But the school had called her.

When she walks into the closed bar, Rude is comfortably teaching Marlene to play poker. It looks like Marlene is winning.

Reno is, much less comfortably, in the kitchen, getting ready to bring out lunch, which the boy is already eating. Denzel says he’s feeling a lot better now.

She decides then, that she’s never going to tell them where Denzel is from.

 **Look**  
Sometimes Reno still catches himself tracking empty space out of the corner of his eye when one of them leaves a room. There’s nothing to it really, just habit. Habit he thought he’d outgrown.

Sometimes he wakes up and he doesn’t remember where he is. Who’s floor is this? Who’s couch is this? When did he start sleeping in actual beds?

When he wakes up alone, he has to take deep breaths, and really think about walking quietly. Sometimes that isn’t enough to remind himself he isn’t the only living thing left in the world.

Sometimes he has to go looking.

 **Summer**  
The three of them lay spread out in the dry grass while the last light fades; two patiently, like they did as children, one restlessly, feeling left out and agitated.

“What’re we doing?”

“You haven’t been out here in the summer have you?”

“No but-”

“Shh.” Slowly at first, easily missed, little flickering lights. Then hundreds of them.

“Whoah! What the fuck is-? What are those? What is…whoah.” Tifa and Rude share a look as Reno throws himself up to a seated position, half to get a better look, and half because he honestly expects some kind of threat.

 **Transformation**  
She goes back to the ruins of Midgar alone once, and only once. The creeping green and the long settled dust do less to change her memory of the place than she’d expected. Her feet could still find their way through what’s left of Under Five and Six, if she needed, but the rubble there has long since been picked clean of anything useful. It’s a long walk, and she stops at the edge of the city.

Instead she climbs. Just enough to get a view back to Edge.

Sometimes she misses the simplicity of enemies with faces, and names she didn't have to learn.

 **Sunset**  
It takes only a few years of heavy reliance on fossil fuels for the sunsets to start to change. The day used to sink into the desert in simple blue and purple lines. Orange on cloudy days. But Edge grows, and some days the air is dense, and slowly, even perfectly clear skies grow red and pink and gold tinged.

Tifa leans out her window with her chin on her hand and watches on particularly vivid evenings. She feels one of them close behind her, leaning over to see what she see’s.

“You alright?”

Rude then.

“Yeah. Just…sometimes…”

“You have to wonder?”

“Yeah.”

 **Letters**  
“Rude, you busy, yo?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh.” A moment, then a messy red head pops through the door, offers her a hopeful smile. “Tifa are you busy?”

“Not really, what’s up?”

“I want to read this.” He holds out a book, and it takes her a moment to realize what he’s asking.

“Okay, bring it here.”

“Fuck yeah!” He jumps onto the couch with her, and settles in with his ankles crossed over her thighs. She takes the book and recognizes the name of a popular science writer. Something about ghosts this time. She flips to the first page.

 **Diamond**  
It still happens sometimes that in the line of duty he has to fuck someone. Today it’s Junon wealth and a merger.

She has diamonds in her ears, heavy glittering things that remind him of car crashes, and that image sticks in his head, somehow.

What he wants is to go home, to cover himself in the smell of Tifa’s hair, and get Rude’s tongue in his mouth, and get his mouth between Tifa’s legs.

What he does is drag his ass to medical for a round of immunization boosters and antibiotics, and make excuses until the labs are all back.

 **Promise**  
Neither has ever promised to come back in one piece. Tifa appreciates that. She’s had enough of promises. More empty ones are the last thing she needs.

She appreciates less that, when they’re gone for work, she hears nothing. Understanding and appreciating are different creatures.

She’d gotten a text at 9. It said simply“home”. She goes to their apartment when the bar closes. A haphazard trail of clothing leading to the bedroom, where they’re fast asleep all over each other. Reno drooling on Rude’s chest with one sock still on, Rude with his shades still in hand. That’s close enough.

 **Simple**  
They are both soaked to the skin and shivering, but happy as they stumble through the door, his fingers carding through her hair, while she sucks rain from his lips. It’s easy enough to get him on the couch, get herself up in his lap, skin warm under cold fabric.

Rude comes home in the middle, and they only sort of stop what they’re doing to acknowledge him. He chuckles, low and affectionate, and pulls them apart just enough to kiss hello, before continuing on into kitchen.

And this is the simplest thing in the world, somehow.

Jealousy has never been a part of their vocabulary.

 **Future**  
Once there had been a bar made of scrap metal and composite board covered over in molasses dark lacquer. It had a pinball machine that had never worked, and a bartender who was about the prettiest girl Rude had ever seen. They didn’t go there very often, but when they did Reno made a show of being a terrible wingman, because it made her laugh, and it made Rude look better. Rude had been pretty sure that she never learned either of their names.

Now, the bar itself is real wood, under real sky, and they go there a lot. Reno never gives up playing though, and Rude doesn’t think he ever will.

 **Winter**  
She had gone to sleep achy and shivering, with a stuffy nose and a pounding headache and no energy left to shower after throwing something the microwave for the kids.

Should have stayed inside when the freeze blew in.

When she wakes, her hair sticks to her face and the blankets she’s tangled badly. She isn’t sure why, some unfamiliar noise.

She reaches for water from the nightstand, finds orange juice, gel caps, and a mug of soup that smells strongly of ginger.

Through the door, which she hadn’t left ajar, Marlene is talking to someone she can’t quite hear, but feels safe anyway.

 **Thousand**  
Rude had never truly stood a chance against one thousand watt smile in the first place. It’s not so much that he has two to contend with now. It’s the way that when they want something, and how alarmingly often they both decide they want something, they have this way of teaming up; he’ll brush of Reno’s electric enthusiasm, and be totally unprepared to counter Tifa’s quiet, hopeful gaze, or vice versa.

“Sure.” He finally concedes. “Next weekend.” He always gives in anymore. But by the time he does, it no longer really feels like a concession.


End file.
